Netflix, Inc.video rental company, founded in 1997 by American entrepreneur Reed Hastings in Los Gatos, California.

In 1999 Netflix began offering an online subscription service through the Internet. Subscribers

choose

chose movie and television titles from Netflix’s Web site; the shows

are

were then mailed to customers in the form of DVDs, along with prepaid return envelopes, from one of more than 100 distribution centres. Although typically customers

may rent

rented for a flat monthly fee as many movies per month as they

wish for a flat monthly fee

wished, the number of DVDs in their possession at any one time

is

was limited according to their subscription plans. Netflix

has

had tens of thousands of movie titles in its catalog.

In 2007 Netflix began offering subscribers the option to stream some of its movies and television shows directly to their homes through the Internet. For most subscription plans, the streaming service is was unlimited. In 2008 Netflix and the Microsoft Corporation released software that enabled videos to be streamed over an Internet connection to the Xbox 360 video console. In 2010 Netflix introduced a streaming-only plan that offered unlimited streaming service but no DVDs. Netflix then expanded beyond the United States by offering the streaming-only plan in Canada in 2010 and in Latin America and the Caribbean in 2011. Netflix announced in September 2011 that it would split into two separate services. Netflix would provide video streaming only, and Qwikster would rent DVDs and video games to customers through the mailits streaming and mail-based services, with the latter to be called Qwikster; a month later, however, citing an outcry from its subscribers, Netflix abandoned the planned split.

Netflix launched the $1 million Netflix Prize contest in 2006 to see if anyone could improve by 10 percent its recommendation system, an algorithm for predicting an individual’s movie preferences based on previous rental data. The open competition spurred many clever data-mining innovations from contestants. The 10 percent threshold was reached on June 26, 2009, by BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos, a team made up of seven mathematicians, computer scientists, and engineers from the United States, Canada, Austria, and Israel. At the end of a 30-day verification period, during which other teams attempted to beat BellKor’s entry, the team submitted its final, winning entry. It was awarded the prize on September 21, 2009.